Taxpayers need good government data

Published August 5, 2025 5:00am ET



President Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday after the July Employment Situation report revised May and June payroll estimates down by more than 250,000 jobs total.

Trump is a businessman who is used to paying for good data, and so he understandably was flummoxed by the BLS’s consistently overestimating initial jobs numbers, only to revise them down later. But the BLS commissioner is not a chief financial officer, and the jobs report is collected and reported by literally thousands of people. There is no way McEntarfer cooked the books.

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